SACRAMENTO, Calif. - This summer everyone's getting into the pool on the teller line at SAFE Credit Union. They're not getting all wet, though. The $1.2 billion CU is beta testing the latest version of the Exametric Workforce Management Suite, including a new pool feature designed to help streamline scheduling among multiple branches. "We have 14 branches and our managers do their own scheduling, but I'm in charge of the floating people, so I'm really excited about the new pooling feature," says Kathleen Harless, assistant vice president for member service administration at SAFE CU. "With this, I'll be able to simply go out into the system and see what branch needs the most help and with just the touch of a button, send them who they need." SAFE CU (www.safecu.org) has only been an Exametric client since March, replacing manual scheduling with Exametric's automated solution in a process that involved sending the company a year's worth of data and then one day of training, Harless says. "It was very simple and very easy," she says. In addition to pooled scheduling, the upgraded version now in beta at SAFE CU includes improved auto-scheduling capabilities and a customizable interface, says Elaine Therrien, director of product management at San Diego-based Exametric Inc. (www.exametric.com). The 4-year-old company has about 20 clients, including four credit unions. Some of those clients are quite big: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York and Huntington, for example, and the Exametric Workforce Management Suite is scalable to handle a credit union with four or five locations or a mega-bank with 6,000, Therrien says. "The only real difference between those large customers and our credit unions is in our delivery mechanism," Therrien says. "For the credit unions we provide a managed, hosted service that we configure and deploy for them, as well as forecast analysis. "We import transaction data for each one of their branches and we produce a monthly forecast for them to help them plan where and when to place their staff. And now, the pooling feature is particularly attractive to credit unions with a regional or local focus, since their staff can more easily float from branch to branch." Therrien says the Web-hosted version requires nothing more than a Web browser on the client side and, to get things started, extracted data from which to build a history. "It doesn't matter who the processor is," Therrien says. "We have customers using Metavante, Fiserv, Jack Henry, the entire gamut." She says the typical customer begins seeing a positive ROI within 12 months. At SAFE CU, Harless says the goal is to be able to reduce FTEs by about 5% in 12 months while improving member service. "This system allows us to staff our branches according to what we can predict will be member demand. For instance, the first of the month is on a Wednesday. We know which branches will see the most business, and when, and we can schedule our staff in half-hour increments," she says. "It's particularly helpful for efficiently scheduling part-time employees, to make sure we have the right people there at the right time. And our IT staff has had no problems with it." -